Evaluating Leading Web Search Engines on Children’s Queries

Abstract

This study compared retrieved results, relevance ranking, and overlap across Google, Yahoo!, Bing, Yahoo Kids!, and Ask Kids on 15 queries constructed by middle school children. Queries included one word, two words, and multiple words/phrases/natural language, and the results were benchmarked against Google and Yahoo Kids! top 5 and top 10 retrieved results using a new relevance ranking metric. Yahoo! and Bing yielded similar results on all queries, but their relevance ranking differed on one-word queries. Ask Kids outperformed Yahoo Kids! on all queries, and a modest percentage of results had the same relevance ranking as Google. Yahoo Kids! and Ask Kids returned unique results that were not retrieved by the other three engines on the first results page. Yahoo! and Bing produced the highest percentage in overlap with Google followed by Ask Kids. Implications are made for children and mediators concerning the use of search engines on children’s queries.